Pat Rowe
officially retired from UW's psychology department in September, although
she continues to be actively involved, a note from the psych department
points out. A faculty member in industrial and organizational psych
since 1965, Rowe served as acting dean of arts in 1973-74 and dean of
graduate studies 1991-99.
A reception today "will provide an opportunity for campus
colleagues, friends and family to offer good wishes". The event runs from
4 to 6 p.m. at the University Club.

It's Friday and it's payday

Just about everybody on the regular payroll at UW, whether "monthly"
or "biweekly", gets paid today -- dates for the two payrolls happen
to coincide, because January's pay date was moved ahead a
week from the usual "last Friday of the month". (Faculty and monthly-paid staff
will next see cheques, or the electronic equivalent, on February 28.)

And today everybody's looking at pay information, either on paper or
electronically through
'myHRinfo',
and maybe wondering where the money went.

Some changes from the December bottom line will be the result of
alterations in deductions for taxes, Employment Insurance and Canada
Pension that happen every year on January 1. And people who reached
annual limits on EI and CPP deductions several months ago are paying
premiums again with the start of the new calendar year.

In addition to all that, pay deductions for UW's own pension plan have
jumped back to the "normal" level, after six years of being reduced because the
pension fund was showing a surplus.
As
announced in October, all good things must come to an end, as
the surplus was rapidly running out. So from last year's
level -- 60 per cent of normal -- individual premiums jumped to 100 per
cent of normal as of January 1. "Normal" means
"4.55 per cent of salary up to the Yearly Maximum Pension
Earnings (YMPE) of $39,900 and 6.5 per cent beyond that".

UW, as the employer, also puts money into the pension fund --
an amount at least equal to what the employees pay.

A computer science graduate
student and a UW professor were part of a winning research team in a
recent international contest exploring protein development -- key
work to advance cures for many diseases.

Jinbo
Xu, jointly supervised by
Ming Li and
Prabhakar Ragde
of the school of computer science, played a role
in developing a computer program called Raptor (Rapid Protein
Threading predictOR), which predicts how proteins fold. The program
won the recent Critical Assessment of Fully Automated Structure
Prediction competition.
Specifically, the Raptor program developed by Xu and Li was ranked
No. 1 among automatic non-meta prediction programs for 3D
(three-dimensional) protein structure prediction.

Besides Xu and Li, Raptor's main authors also include Ying Xu, based
at the Oak Ridge National Lab, who developed an earlier protein
structure prediction program Prospect, which
had
won the 2001 award. The goal
is to evaluate the performance of fully automatic
structure prediction servers. Raptor
predictions took more than 300 CPU-hours on the Waterloo supercomputer
Flexor.

"Raptor's No. 1 ranking is a very high achievement since protein
structure prediction is a difficult and very important field, and
many famous people have been working on this for all their lives,"
said Li. "This was because of its very talented designer and
implementer Jinbo Xu, who has worked extremely hard day and night on
this for the last year, and our new approach to protein structure
prediction by linear programming to optimize the energy functions."

Li, who also holds UW's Canada Research Chair in Bioinformatics,
added that while Raptor supplants all existing automatic protein
predictions, it is still not solving the problem fully. "This is
important work is because protein structure prediction is an
extremely hot area, and key to the success of worldwide proteomics
efforts. . . . Determining the three-dimensional
structures of proteins is a key step from genes to drugs."

History prof writes first novel

A UW history professor will face the world in a new role tomorrow,
reading from his just-published first novel at a local bookstore.
The author is Stan Johannesen, and the book is
titled Sister Patsy. It's distributed by
Pandora Press Publishers.

The author will be reading Saturday at 1:30 p.m. at
Words Worth
Books in central Waterloo. A reading at the UW bookstore is
scheduled for next month.

Says the cover blurb for Sister Patsy:
"This fable of defeat and redemption, of innocence and the knowledge of
evil, unfolds against a colourful backdrop of camp meetings, revivals,
preachers, gospel singers, flamboyant evangelists. Of mysterious birth
and eccentric upbringing, self-taught, apprenticed to an itinerant
preacher, Sister Patsy has a gift, a power both to move great crowds of
people and to inspire intense devotion in a few. But on a stormy summer
night in 1939, in a back-street immigrant chapel in New York City, the
forces opposed to her are gathering strength. Sister Patsy has new
lessons to learn in this night, lessons of freedom, of courage, and of
responsibility."

Johannesen (right) tells more about his work:
"This, my first novel, had its genesis in a number of scholarly articles
and essays in which I had explored the world of my childhood, the
Norwegian
immigrant community in Brooklyn in the 1940s and 50s.

"Having
quickly discovered that the most interesting stories from this world
could not be told in these forms, I turned to writing fiction, and
published several short stories in Queen's Quarterly,
Grain, Malahat
Review, Of(f)course and Descant. Eventually
Sister Patsy emerged on her
own, a figure full-blown from the imagination. The novel is a gnostic
meditation (the Holy Ghost is a not very pleasant character in the
novel), a portrait of an immigrant community and culture, and a
celebration of charisma, intelligence and beauty."

He reports that
a second novel, already completed, is set in Denmark during the war,
against the backdrop of the resistance and the rescue of the Danish Jews.

"The project is the result of a collaboration with Virgil Burnett,
neighbour and friend in Stratford, retired fine arts professor from UW,
and well-known writer, artist and book illustrator, now working chiefly
in sculpture. Burnett is founder and editor of
Pasdeloup
Press, a
distinguished small literary press in Ontario. He suggested publication
with Pasdeloup, and offered to do the series of pen and ink
illustrations which grace the finished book."

Two pub concerts cancelled

Hip-hop artist
Kardinal
Offishall(left), Jamaican-Canadian master of "the T-dot sound",
was scheduled to play Federation
Hall tomorrow night. The concert has been postponed, according
to the Federation of Students web site, and so has tonight's
scheduled show at the Bombshelter by Andy Stochansky. Reason: both pubs
remain closed in a dispute between UW administration and the Federation
over how they're to be managed.

The Fed web
site also announces that "a protest against the
continuing actions of the University administration and in support of
Fed Hall and Bomber staff who have lost their jobs" will start at 12:30
today in the arts quadrangle. "The
March will proceed to Needles Hall, the SLC, and
then to Fed Hall, where a press conference will be held to announce the
creation of a Staff Support Fund for these employees."

Business ethics, and other events

With stock fraud, price-fixing,
environmental mismanagement and corporate human rights abuses making
headlines, it's time to bring the rules of ethics back into business, says
author and business consultant John Dalla Costa. The founder of the Centre
for Ethical Orientation, a Toronto-based consulting firm, Dalla
Costa will deliver the 2002-2003 Ignatian Lecture on "The Ten Commandments:
A Theology for Business Leaders" at St. Jerome's University tonight.
The event takes place at 7:30 p.m. in Siegfried Hall, with free admission.

Dalla Costa has addressed conferences around the world, including the
Vienna Peace Summit and the Global Business Forum at the United Nations
Millennial Summit in New York. His 20 years of business experience includes
nine years as president of an advertising and marketing agency.
He is the author of The Ethical Imperative: Why Moral
Leadership is Good Business and Working Wisdom: The Ultimate Value in
the New Economy. He is a
graduate of the Advanced Management Program at Harvard Business School, and
has taught in the Executive Management Program at Queen's University.

The Ignatian Lecture, sponsored by the Society of Jesus (Jesuits), is part
of the 2002-03 season of the St. Jerome's Centre for Catholic Experience.
St. Jerome's

And more:
Tours of the new Co-op and Career Services building are offered
again today at 12:00 and 12:30 (meet in the main lobby). I actually set
foot in CEC for the first time yesterday, ducking into the lower level
briefly as I was walking through the Arts Pedestrian Tunnel. The entrance
to CEC is about halfway along the giant helix that runs from South
Campus Hall to Arts Lecture. Step inside, and there are the dropoff
slot for co-op documents, a photocopying machine, and washrooms that also
have lockers, for the benefit of students changing into interview
clothes and back into civvies.

Jason West, graduate student in philosophy, will give a colloquium today
on "Aquinas's Commentaries on Aristotle" (2:30, Humanities room
334). . . . "Selling Your Skills" is today's one workshop in the career
development series -- information is available
online. . . .
Engineering alumni are enjoying Ski day at Osler Bluff today. . . .
A group from the International Student Association is skiing for the
weekend at Mont Tremblant. . . .
UW alumni in Victoria are invited to a reception tonight at
St. Ann's Academy. . . .

The ACM-style programming contest for this term will be
held tomorrow. "All members of the community are welcome," says Gordon
Cormack of the computer science department, although I suppose he means
only those members of the community who know how to write programs.
Last-minute details are
available on the web.

Sports this weekend:
The men's volleyball Warriors have two home games this weekend, hosting
Toronto tonight and Ryerson tomorrow (both at 7 p.m. in the PAC main gym).
The women's hockey team
hosts Western tonight at 7:30 (also at the Icefield) and goes to
Windsor Saturday afternoon.
The men's hockey team, meanwhile, hosts Windsor at 2:00 tomorrow at the
Icefield, then goes to Windsor for a return game Sunday.
Away from Waterloo, the basketball teams both
play at Western tomorrow afternoon; the indoor hockey team is at Carleton
for a weekend tournament; the Nordic skiers are at Duntroon for a meet;
the track and field team heads for McGill; and the women's volleyball team
plays at Brock Saturday night.